Education reform in the United States is heavily regulated and has undergone various iterations in the past several decades. With each passing legislation, government mandates and educational initiatives become the focus of reform. School districts must constantly find ways to keep up with increasing state and federal accountability standards.…

Studies have identified negative effects of cortisol, a stress hormone, on academic performance. Because natural disasters induce community-wide stress, students who experience natural disasters may subsequently perform worse academically. Our study is the first to examine the immediate effects of close exposure to a natural disaster on academic…

All individuals develop new skills over time and one important developmental stage is when individuals can learn in the absence of direct reinforcement. Behavior Analytic theories have stressed the importance of these emergent response repertoires and have consistently studied them across fields (i.e. Incidental Bidirectional Naming, Arbitrarily…

Primary Scientific Literature (PSL) significantly contributes to cultivating students' scientific literacy. However, students' visual strategies while reading PSL remain unclear. This study utilized eye-tracking technology to clarify students' visual attention allocation and fixation transactions during PSL reading, and explored their associations…

The present research aims to examine whether the questions in the Program for the International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 reading literacy instrument display differential item functioning (DIF) among the Turkish, French, and American samples based on univariate and multivariate matching techniques before and after the total score, which is…

Reading comprehension is one of the most valuable academic skills taught in school. Selecting the appropriate assessment instrument to ensure early identification and intervention is important as there is an amalgam of cognitive abilities and academic skills involved in reading comprehension. The GORT-5 is the most recent edition of a test that…

Statewide assessments in reading and math are required every year under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) of 2015, at an annual expense of billions of taxpayer dollars. Analyzing 10 years of school-level results from public schools in two states-- Nebraska and Texas--we found that year-to-year correlations of schools' test scores were…

The purpose of this two-phase, sequential explanatory mixed-methods research study was to examine the correlation between kindergarten through fifth-grade teachers' self-efficacy and the impact on literacy achievement to determine how professional development (PD) positively impacted teachers with high self-efficacy. The study was conducted in a…

Vocabulary knowledge is one of the most important elements of reading comprehension. Text coverage is the proportion of known words in a given text. We hypothesize that text comprehension increases exponentially with text coverage due to network effects and activation of prior knowledge. In addition, the lexical threshold hypothesis states that…

The ongoing literacy crisis in the U.S. highlights an urgent need for effective, scalable literacy instruction. REED Charitable Foundation (RCF) is a non-profit organization that provides structured literacy training informed by Orton-Gillingham, along with ongoing professional coaching and comprehensive implementation support to help all students…

Concerns about the negative effects of digitalization on students' reading comprehension, empirically backed by recent meta-analyses, question the efficacy of digital tools in the language arts classroom. By analyzing data from 4 and 8th grade US students from NAEP 2017, we aimed to test the generalization of the negative association between…

The present study investigated the predictability of a computer-adaptive, curriculum-based reading assessment for measuring second-grade students' overall and comprehension reading achievement on a standardized reading achievement test. Specifically, second-grade student scores (N = 428) of the Istation's Indicators of Progress for Early Reading…

This study examines relationships between digital SAT scores and other relevant educational measures, such as high school grade point average (HSGPA), PSAT/NMSQT Total score, and Average AP Exam score, and compares those relationships to current paper and pencil SAT score relationships with the same measures. This information can provide…

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the effects of reading habits among college level foundation Omani students and their impact on the participants' performance in tests. The study used a qualitative and quantitative research method in which 70 participants from the foundation level were included. A survey questionnaire was used…

This three-manuscript dissertation attempts to answer the question: "How does students' English language proficiency (ELP) inform the availability, structure, and use of English language accommodations and intervention to support the academic achievement of English learner (EL) students?" The question is addressed using three independent…